How I could aquire the customer serial number?

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Hello everybody!
Searching throught the archives I found, thanks to Jonathan Nathan, that a serial number can be aquired with the command line:
ioreg -l | grep serial-number | awk '{print $2, $4}
Does anybody know how I could aquire the customer serial number, the one that is displayed on the apple system profiler screen? I am working on MacOS X 10.2.8.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a command line. An applescript method, if any, of aquiring that information woud also be welcome!
Any help will be much appreciated!
Thanks,
Theo

#2

Actually, it was Greg who came up with the SN info. On my machine, this returns an encoded string that needs to be converted (and then tweaked one last bit):

set the_sn to text 2 thru -2 of (do shell script "ioreg -l | grep serial-number | awk '{print $4}'")
set the_sn to hex_to_string(the_sn)
--on my machine, this is close but needs a slight reworking:
set the_sn to ((text 4 thru -1 of the_sn) & (text 1 thru 3 of the_sn))

on hex_to_string(this_string)
	set return_string to ""
	repeat with i from 1 to length of this_string by 252
		try
			set return_string to return_string & (run script "?data cstr" & (text i thru (i + 251) of this_string) & "00? as string")
		on error
			set return_string to return_string & (run script "?data cstr" & text i thru -1 of this_string & "00? as string")
		end try
	end repeat
	return return_string
end hex_to_string

Jon

#3

Thank you Jon! You are a savior!
Apologies for the late reply but I was caught up on cruise ship project working on location.
Your solution is great! The only problem I am having with the script is that somehow what it appears as an “-” (dash) on the system profiler translates as an “H” when I use the script. Any ideas why this is happening?
A have a few more questions:

  • An applescript running on the same eMac under MacOS 9.2 reads 4 extra digits when it is aquiring the serial number info. Any ideas why I am not getting a report of those on MacOS 10.2.8 how to finally aquire those numbers as well?
  • Any pointers to get more info on the
"«data cstr"

part of your script?

  • Any pointers to a list with all the related call statements using the ioreg method on a shell script?
    Once again thank you!

Theo